Racist dogs! No, not the four- legged ones.

The dog days of summer aren't quite here yet, but a few stories today have me thinking about dogs.

The first one involves his O ness and his lack of a best friend-the four- legged kind that every man should have. Apparently when you are president of these divided states it helps to have a pet. It seems that Obama's black side is winning the battle on whether to have a pet or not and that's not a good thing. He got a dog for Sasha and Malia, but now, apparently, he might need to get one for himself.

Diana C. Mutz, the Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science at Penn, studied the electoral appeal of Barack Obama in the fall, crunching a wealth of voter data from the 2008 campaign, and came to a simple, surprising, but unshakable conclusion:
Dude could have used a dog.
Turns out all that sensitive talk about selecting the right sort of pooch for daughters Malia and Sasha (rescue or pup? what's good with allergies?) reinforced the qualities that Mutz suspects cooled some voters to his candidacy.
Instead of making Obama seem pet-friendly, focus on his canine considerations underscored the fact that the presidential contender did not have a dog - or any animal at home.
And in this country, pets and politics have long gone hand in hand, paw, or claw.
FDR had Fala. Nixon had Checkers. LBJ had those beagles he dangled by the ears.
Obama turns out to be the first petless person elected president in our nation's history, according to Mutz's research. (Chester Alan Arthur, the 21st president, was similarly petless, but he wasn't elected; he rose to his position after James Garfield was shot.)" [story]

My friend Daniel Rubin might have really stumbled unto something here. It's all about the pets.

O man if not a dog, may I suggest a parrot? Just make sure you keep him in the room with your top advisers when you are not around. You might want to find out later what they said behind your back.

The other dog story involves a dog who has probably been hanging around the tea party folks too long. Did you know that dogs can be trained to be racist? I did. I saw that movie back in the day. Still, it's not the poor dog's fault. The poor animal can only do what he is trained to do. I blame the owners. But honestly, the very thought of a racist dog is almost laughable. As if us racism chasers don't have enough to worry about with humans. Besides, I honestly thought that dogs couldn't see colors. Oh well, maybe some dogie expert reading this can help me with that one.

"Let's forget for a second that the dog was doing his job (barking at an intruder) and look at some science. Most animal behaviorists agree that dogs can be taught to react against sets of individuals. A dog could also learn to dislike individuals if they suffered some trauma by members of a group at an early age.

The dogs' vision can also play a role. Though dogs can see colors, they do so with far less sharpness than humans. I've read a report where a dog's eyesight had deteriorated to the point that dark moving objects appeared to be big scary moving blobs. Jeeze! I would bark at that too.So, yes, a dog can react negatively to certain people. But I refuse to call a dog racist." [ story]

Me too. It should be the other way around.

Finally, speaking of dogs; did you see the latest comment from Newt?

"..Mr. Obama is "the most radical president in American history," Gingrich said. "He has said, 'I run a machine, I own Washington, and there is nothing you can do about it.'"
"What we need is a president, not an athlete," Gingrich said during a question and answer period after his speech. He added: "Shooting three point shots may be clever, but it doesn't put anybody to work." [story]

Translated: we need a real president not a black man pretending to be a president. You know all those black people are good athletes. But that's all they are; athletes.